Free to Lie

I have what is called the "good insurance" and it has never let me down.

But it doesn't provide health care. 

I got no help with my cholesterol until it became an illness. Now I take pills for it. The same thing for my kids' ADHD and whatever it is my wife has -- she's never been diagnosed with anything.

There is a big difference between health care and health insurance.

• Health care involves regular coaching, either from a doctor or someone like her. It's wellness management, and referrals to whoever may be needed to keep you well. It's exercise, it's diet, it's mental health.
• Health insurance, like car insurance, waits for something to go horribly wrong and then pays a portion of the repair bills.

Health care is also cheaper than health insurance. A lot cheaper. Think about the cost of managing your diet from the time you stop seeing a pediatrician until the diagnosis comes of diabetes. Or heart disease. Or alcoholism. Or morbid obesity. Now imagine we know from your family history that Type II diabetes, or cholesterol problems, or obesity, are very likely heading for you. Health care can prevent disease, not just manage it.

Compare that to what health insurance will do for, or to, diabetics when they're suddenly diagnosed, seemingly out of the blue, in mid-life. Constant monitoring, forced diets that can cause other problems, no attention to the mental aspects of this wrenching change. Small wonder patients become impatient, getting worse and worse, costing society more and more. 

Yes, it's simpler if they wait and wait and wait until they get the diagnosis they're about to die, and are just waved bye-bye. That's called Social Darwinism. And it goes against every precept of a civilized society, everything that is truly American, as well as all the norms of medicine.

If you're for that, please state so clearly, but while you're at it pay back all that government aid you've been collecting -- the state-funded education, the government-backed home loans, the aid your business got to get going, the VA care, the Medicare. (Need I add the military and police protection you have gotten all these years?) At least be honest with yourself, if you're not going to be honest with the rest of us.

That's what I think, but here's the real secret of our time. You won't. You will stand there as a naked hypocrite, unashamed, and pretend that you, the naked Emperor, are wearing the finest of suits, which you made with your own two hands. 

There is an important political lesson in all this. 

While proponents of health reform have to act like Democrats, their opponents are free to lie.

Dick Armey had a grand old time on Meet the Press yesterday. He smiled constantly. And why not. He could say anything he wanted, he could lie like the devil (and did) yet he could never really be called to account for any of it.

That's because of a bubble  built by conservatives over a generation, a bubble of iron. If all you hear is FoxNews or the Christian Broadcast Network, if all you read is The Wall Street Journal or the Washington Times, if the people you have taught yourself to believe are Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, Dick Armey can say anything he wants. He can contradict himself from sentence-to-sentence (as he did) and never get called on it.

That's because, inside your iron bubble, anyone who criticizes Armey is a "liberal" and thus not to be trusted. Anyone who questions his motives has bad motives of their own. Anyone who gets him on the facts will have all their past work dissected, and any small mistake equated with his whoppers. Oh, and they must have bad motives, while his are pure. Even if, until just yesterday, they were his staunch ally. 

It's Alice in Wonderland politics. 

Why the Obama people weren't ready for this is beyond me. What was the Bush Administration but a nonstop voyage down the rabbit hole. The same people complaining about the cost of recovery fought two wars with borrowed money, spent trillions of dollars killing thousands of our best, but now hold themselves out as guardians against "the deficit drowning your children and grandchildren."

Witness Armey's tag team partner yesterday. None other than Tom "C Street" Coburn, a man who attends a church which holds that only Stalin, Mao and Hitler understood the Bible in the last century, an ob-gyn who claimed "doctor-patient privilege" so as not to be called on what he discussed with another C Street hooligan, Mark Sanford. And who also can claim to be a minister if that will get him out of testifying. 

C'mon.

None of it passes even a rudimentary smell test, yet it's just par for the course. All the lies of the Bush Administration -- the recount, the deficits, the wars, the torture, the corruption, the politicization of every part of government -- all of it, only moved about 1 American in 20 from voting for the right to voting for the left. The vast majority of last year's Bushies are still Bushies, still ready to believe anything Rupert Murdoch tells them, still ready to march against anyone Dick Armey or Tom Coburn points out to them, for any reason.

We have faced this sort of thing with every new Thesis, every generation. Those now alive may remember the hatred we had of Richard Nixon, even before Watergate, and the instinctive distrust millions had of his every motive. (Yes you may be paranoid if they are out to get you.) Historians will talk about how the wealthy hated FDR, or how the Populists raged after 1896. 

But the closest analogue we have to our own time, in terms of a willingness to call white-black and black-white, of pure ideological upside-downism, has to be the Confederacy. 

Southerners had already spent a generation engaged in small-scale terrorism before Fort Sumter, starting in the early 1830s. And their arguments -- still etched in places like the Confederate Monument in downtown Decatur a mile from my home -- attest to this.

What was this "covenant," and this fealty to the  "original intent" of the Constitution? Nothing but a series of excuses to treat men like horses, to rape women and force them to bear the resulting children, then to treat those children as property, never mind how much they looked like master. 

That's what this covenant was, and that's what this new covenant is. It is racism, it is privilege willing to kill to maintain itself. It is not a coincidence that the strongest support for Dick Armey's nonsense is among southern whites, or among western whites descended from those who committed genocide against the Indians and then romanticized it. 

The biggest mistake we make in war and politics is to stop when the fighting does. What we allowed after the Civil War, besides Jim Crow, was the attitude to flourish that somehow the South was right, that there was some "noble cause" involved in that conflict other than the enslavement of another race. Not only did this become common currency in the South but in the North as well. 

Even 71 years after that war was over a book romanticizing it, Martha Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, became a national sensation. The film made from that book was the high point of American cinema. And we are now just as distant from that book, and that movie, as they were from the Civil War. Yet we still fight the same battles. Only the ground where we fight them has changed, only the names by which we fight them have changed, only the party under whose banner the Confederacy marches has changed. 

Thus the failure of  the Civil Rights era. Equality was written into law and what more do you want? What we should have said is, a truly different attitude, namely that everyone deserves true equality of opportunity -- the same education, the same level of upward mobility. Regardless of color, but especially regardless of the class you were born into. And policies that would enforce such equality of opportunity, that would measure what you overcame to get your grades as well as the grades themselves.

It's among those we call the "lower class" that these lies hold the most power. Lies explain reality better than truth. Lies explained to southern whites that they were still better than some people, and they still do.

Wherever Americans or their foreign policy advocates go in the world, we need to understand our own history, understand how long and difficult the job is of eradicating the lies from which conflict emerges, and how important it is to fight the lies after the battle, fight them hard and fight them constantly. 

The biggest lie being told today, frankly, is that America's President is a nigger. Thus that those of us who support him are nigger-lovers.

The President is a mixed-race Hawaiian, a man who inherited the values of his mother and the genius of his father, a patriot who benefited from the cultural heritage of his stepfather and the best America's meritocracy has to offer, a man who is, from the way he has lived his life, better than 99.999% of his critics.

Better than you for damned sure. 

Anyone who compares America's President to Hitler, or seeks to dishonor those who support him, is an enemy of everything America claims to be about. Dick Armey needs to have that smirk slapped off his face. Tom Coburn should be made to go away.

It's past time for Democrats and liberals to understand what is happening,  to stop being a Silent Majority, to become again a loud and vocal one, and to fight the wars of our present in order to win a future for our children.